


June

by LNJames



Series: Suddenly Everything Has Changed [3]
Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-28
Updated: 2018-04-28
Packaged: 2019-04-29 03:29:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,465
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14464011
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LNJames/pseuds/LNJames
Summary: What if you can't wake up?Season 3 re-imagined. Canon-ish with liberty and justice for all.





	June

_Every love is your best love; and every love is your last love._

On the twenty-first day, the sun felt the farthest away from her skin and with that distance, came a softness that was almost human. Almost. It reminded her that the longest day on Earth couldn’t keep the humans she wanted closest any closer than Lena already was, draped across her as the sun rose orange in the east. She remembered those three summer months as if they were each a life lived, each distinct, each defined by what came before or what came after. Kara Zor-El marked time with all the befores and afters she could count. There were, of course, the big ones: Before Krypton exploded. After Earth imploded. Before the Danvers. After Alex, after Eliza, after everyone. Before Supergirl. After Supergirl. This was her way of keeping deep time and holding on to the past where Krypton and Earth each once existed.

But when she wanted to zero in on a feeling, when Kara wanted to narrow the gap between a certain summer and now, between the way the sun poured from her like golden light to the way she felt now, after all the time that had passed since the buttery softness of a June summer day on Earth, Kara tuned into the frequency of the cosmos and marveled at how the numbers always added up just right. In her suspended state of nothingness, Kara Zor-El consulted the memory-keep that outlasted anything else built or born on the green-blue planet that no longer was. Leave it to L-Corp to invent an indestructible time capsule that outlived everything before and after her time on Earth. Leave it Lena to leave a record of them, memory imprints woven together on the edges of a golden key and around the circumference of a Kryptonian gem that still hung from Kara’s neck. Leave it to magic that such a thing still clung to her for so very, very long across so many, many light years.

_Are you sure this is going to work, Lena? No, but I want to believe it will. Don’t you?_

Yes, she wanted to believe, but that doubt lingered back then, when things were different. When she was different and had not lived and lost lifetimes. _Before Lena. After Lena_. Now, when Kara Zor-El felt a familiar pull towards the things she had lost long ago and with it, a need for the softness that came like muscle memory or a phantom limb, she knew it was the key speaking. Around her neck, it held a time code so far into the past that she had to recreate it with the math of the cosmos and a certain set of Befores and Afters because there had been so many. That June day was somewhere After Rhea and the Daxamites but Before the Worldkillers. It was After Lillian but Before the Legion. It was such a small blip of time, three summer months when the world she knew held steady and the love that held her steady existed. The code on a key synced with the atoms in her body and she remembered. Like the steady drip of liquid hydrogen that kept her alive, the memory of that June seeped into every cell and flooded her in soft, pale morning light. If she had a choice, Kara would choose to drown in this warm, false ocean.

*

_She had woken first and for a moment, wasn’t sure where she was. Deep sleep came rarely for her and when it did, it always surprised Kara that her body gave her that blank calm nothingness, allowed it. She was on Earth. She was in National City. She was in Lena’s apartment. Everything was quiet, everything was soft. She heard a heart beat steady. She heard other heart beats. She heard all people in all the buildings across the city beginning to wake up. She heard the wind and the high wispy clouds barely there. She even heard the slight sizzle and crack along the edge of the horizon where the sun started to heat up the atoms in the atmosphere of a planet that would eventually die. Kara blinked her eyes shut again and opened them, shaking away the thought she always had in the back of her mind. All matter is neither created nor destroyed, just transformed and the Earth would be no different. Krypton lived on in other ways, fragmented molecules flung out into space to bind with others and transform into something else entirely. No wonder her body was reluctant to let her sleep if this was what her mind did to her when she woke up._

_“..so early...Kara..”_

_She smiled as she felt Lena adjust and keep herself draped over her body, a Luthor arm and leg trying to hold Kara down as if that could keep her from flying away. She liked it, liked the weight of this particularly soft human doing her best impression of gravity fighting a superhero’s urge towards the sky. She let her fingers trail up and down a spine, bare against her hand, knowing that each touch sent tiny sparks skittering against Lena’s skin. The side effects of being in love. When she felt Lena shiver and goosebumps raise against her fingertips, Kara smiled again._

_“Mmm hmm..very early..but it’s Earth solstice. The longest day of the year..”_

_Weight from her shoulder shifted and Lena raised her head, black hair wavy and mussed. Their bodies were so close, hardly any space between, and green eyes blinked back at her while a sleepy crooked smile caught the pale of the morning sunrise. It was unfair, really, that someone like Lena Luthor could look this good in the morning after looking like she had last night, so transcendentally beautiful and dark that Kara found it hard to keep her hands steady and her eyes off curves perfectly hugged in a little black dress._

_They had gone to one of three fundraisers that L-Corp planned to host each month this summer to rebuild the city after the Daxamite invasion. The riverfront parks and infrastructure needed significant repair, buildings throughout the city had been damaged, roads and bridges all survived blasts and the people of National City were rebuilding. The outdoor tent and stage sparkled, the philanthropic set mingled, food and drink flowed, and Kara watched it all with carefully, still not trusting the peace that settled after the stormy spring. But she smiled and mingled as Kara Danvers, spending her time equally with Jess, the newly appointed L-Corp Pollinate Peace director and with the ever quotable social set who wrote checks and drank the open bar with abandon and privilege. Kara did her best not to be drawn too close to Lena or her face would have given her away to anyone who might notice. The other press was starting to speculate that a certain reporter and a certain CEO were romantically linked. They still wanted a quiet life even when they knew the could not have it, but it was June and summer was settling in and Kara could not keep her eyes off the event’s hostess, who greeted and smiled and charmed her way through the crowd. Lena had even caught her several times, across the room, as Kara’s eyes had roamed and smirked, feeling the slight heat of Kara’s vision on those very same curves that pressed into her now. Oh the side effects of being in love!_

_“Which is exactly why we should sleep in. It’s Sunday, Kara.”_

_Kara couldn’t help it when her hip gently pressed up and over, rolling Lena on to her back and taking the opportunity to get a different view._

_“But what if I want to..be awake..and..”_

_She watched as Lena chuckled and shook her head, dark hair fanned out against green sheets like a bed of grass._

_“You’re incorrigible, Kara Danvers. If the press keep hounding me about you, that’s what I’m going to have to say and it will shock everyone you’ve fooled into thinking you’re sweet and innocent and..wholesome.”_

_Kara raised an eyebrow as Lena’s hands found her own curves and squeezed at that last word._

_“I am very wholesome, I will have you know, Ms. Luthor.”_

_The woman under her let out another soft laugh at that._

_“You know I love it when you call me that.”_

_Kara wiggled her eyebrows and let her hand wander, fingertips tracing down a long neck and over a beauty mark and eyes following._

_“Look who’s incorrigible now.”_

_She looked up and saw Lena close her eyes, smile still lazily gracing her lips as she gave Kara more access to her neck. Last night, Kara had to work very hard to be very good about where her hands wanted to go when they were finally done with the event, when everyone had left and they had climbed discreetly into Lena’s car. Chao-xing drove them through the city streets sparkling with Saturday night lights and all Kara wanted to do was either take advantage of Lena in that dress or get her out of it when they got to their destination. It had not made it any easier when Lena crossed her legs and let her own hand fall to Kara’s knee, the hem of her own pale pink party dress gently pushed up. The only problem with last night is that once they got to Lena’s building and once they made it to her large apartment in the sky, the exhaustion of the work week and the social capital that Lena expended to be nice to all the men and older ladies with money to give took its toll on her Luthor. With a mumbled apology and the dead weight of sleep pulling her down, Lena had barely shrugged out of her dress and washed up for bed before she was sound asleep. The side effects of being in love with a human meant that superheroes with superhuman abilities sometimes had to..wait. She had listened to every sound in the city and looked far into the sky for stars that no longer existed until she closed her eyes. With the sun the farthest away from the earth, that wait had been long, but her body relaxed, softened in the middle of the night when Lena’s heartbeat and breath against her lulled her into that rare sleep. But once the sun curved over the horizon, Kara was very much awake and very interested in the woman under her._

_“Promise me you’ll keep my secrets safe.”_

_Kara said this against the pulse point in Lena’s neck, her lips finding a soft throb that meant life hummed strongly in a Luthor body. So much is held in a heart in a day. When Kara felt Lena shift under her, a hand reaching for her own to hold against the bed, fingers entwined, she thought about what she would give, what she would sacrifice to make this life below her immortal. It was crazy talk, but as Kara’s teeth and tongue marked soft skin in a way that said ‘mine’ and in a way that Kara wished wasn’t something that drove her like it did, she thought about how little time she would have and how much time she wanted._

_“You’re always safe with me, Kara…”_

_Softly spoken words made Kara’s hands shake and her body pour out golden light like a pitcher, each drop falling on Lena Luthor like waves that never ended. She wanted to believe. She wanted everything and knew she’d only get a fraction of it. When you fall from the stars from one place to the next, you learn that the leaving and the landing never gets easier. Kara felt one of Lena’s hands in her hair and she closed her eyes tight, held in place by a human who wanted her. The sun’s distance now softened her, let her arms and her hands grow weaker like her resolve. She could feel herself falling away until softer words brought her back._

_“Kiss me...please…”_

_And there were some things in this current life that Kara Zor-El could not fight. She fought many things, fought for many things, landed many punches and took blow after blow. She chose the life she led as Supergirl, it gave her purpose, it gave her part of what was missing in the fall from Krypton. But when Lena Luthor asked, nicely, for things, for her, it gave Kara something else, something so deep it would travel time and distance to remind her that love was the great cosmic glue that took all the elements available at any given moment and transformed them into something else. Her lips pressed in eagerly, willingly, against Lena’s mouth, gasping a little at the contact and the heat. It may be a Sunday in June on planet Earth, but Kara felt like she existed everywhere all at once. She felt a tug at her neck as one of Lena’s hands tangled in the necklace, holding a golden key and a piece of Krypton, never far from her heart. She had made a promise to Lena, to remember her always, and as Kara shifted, her own body wanting and needing, she aimed to keep her word. Right now, she wanted to burn every second, every feeling, every sound, every smell, everything about Lena Luthor as deep into her skin, into the atoms that made up her body, as she could. She swallowed Lena’s gasp as if it were her last breath before drowning._

*

The problem with memory-keeps and time codes programmed with finite numbers is that they never lasted long enough. They never lasted into infinity. A memory could be replayed over and over again, but it could never be stretched out beyond how far the numbers added up. That meant there was always a Before and an After. She could have snippets. She could have pieces. She could have a muscle memory of Lena Luthor pressing into her, neck stretched and eyes closed tight, a human body on the verge of letting go. But she could never string everything together lifetime after lifetime. It was almost a Sisyphean task: Access the memory code Lena had programmed to include the Now, but it was up to Kara Zor-El to fill in the things that came before and the things that came after and she couldn’t fill in every detail she wanted because there were too many moments in between. As she floated in a primordial liquid, she kept living the lives she could access and wishing for those lives to be immortal. Earth was a distant memory. Supergirl no longer existed. She was in the Nowhere.

And Kara Zor-El wanted out.


End file.
